Booking.com indicates that the cheapest room you can grab at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D. C. will run you $595 a night (discounted from $735). That may sound like a lot for a room that feels compelled to advertise that you get a “private bathroom” and “air conditioning,” but there are special features of this particular hotel that aren’t included between free toiletries and (really) toilet.
With the Trump administration’s hard push for increased fossil fuel production, it may come as little surprise that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would address the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry trade group.
But the location of a March 23 API board of directors meeting, where Zinke was a guest speaker, is raising eyebrows. As a recently published log of the interior secretary’s scheduled meetings shows, the speech was held at Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has been at the center of conflict-of-interest concerns.
Way back 19 weeks ago, when Donald Trump was a new born autocrat whining about the under-reporting of his vast, huge, endless inaugural crowd, the whole idea of Trump’s conflict of interest in making money by leasing a historic federal building seemed like a concern. The idea that politicians both foreign and domestic might seek to curry favor with Trump by giving him a peek at their Trump International room keys even brought talk of how it was a violation of the Constitutions’ “emoluments clause.”
That was, by rough count, seventeen thousand scandals and a million casual dismissals of the law ago. With Jared peddling $500,000 visas and Trump tossing endless golden anchors to the drowning concept of American “leadership,” overcharging oil men for sickening cocktails seems like a throwback to more innocent times. Times when we thought “Sure, he’s an ignorant, racist, sexist jackass … but how bad can he really be?”
The Interior secretary wants it known that he only squeezed pockets for the boss just this once …
Of all Zinke’s meetings with energy industry representatives, the API event was the only one held at a location that financially benefits President Donald Trump, the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington noted in a post Monday.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Zinke isn’t available for campaign fund-raisers. Meet and greets. Anything, really.
Zinke, like Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, has emerged as an oil-loving administration ally of the fossil fuel industry. He said in April that Trump’s executive order aimed at opening now-protected areas of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to oil and gas development would “cement our nation’s position as a global energy leader.”
If only we could get rid of all that ice in the way. … Oh, wait.